Against the “Likewise” and toward the “Otherwise”: Lessons from the Past, Reflections for the Present in the Context of Canadian Universities’ Commitments to Address Anti-Black Racism

Abstract

This article turns to Sylvia Wynter’s writings to understand the ways in which the normative functioning of the Canadian university—its Likewise pedagogies—are always already grounded in the overrepresentation of (white Western) Man as synonymous with humanity such that Black and Indigenous lives are negated. It uses this analysis to understand what is at stake for Black communities in universities’ institutional claims to address anti-Black racism in the post–George Floyd moment. It then turns to a meditation on the foundations upon which Otherwise pedagogies—broadly defined as the work meant to disrupt the Likewise pedagogical project of the university and its role in perpetuating the coloniality of being—might be conceived, even if only as interim measures, to pursue a vision for teaching, learning, and knowing otherwise within institutions that have characteristically resisted becoming otherwise.